Gallium Nitride (GaN) may be used as a fabrication material for semiconductor devices. One of the primary advantages of GaN is that GaN has a strain induced piezo-electric charge that allows conduction channels (e.g., two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) region) to be formed within the GaN based semiconductor device without the need for doping the GaN. Eliminating the need for doping the GaN, may reduce the impurity scattering effect of the semiconductor device which may allow intrinsic carrier mobilities to form in a current conducting channel (e.g., 2DEG region) that has a low on-resistance (RDSON).
However GaN may contain traps that, due to a potentially large band gap associated with GaN, may trap or pull and retain mobile carriers within the GaN. These traps may lead to an adverse effect associated with GaN based semiconductor devices known as current collapse which causes a decrease in a quantity of mobile carriers in the current conducting channel. A semiconductor device may rely on a combination of a GaN substrate and a common substrate (e.g., a Silicon (Si) substrate, a Silicon-Carbide (SiC) substrate, or other similar type of substrate made from a material that exhibits similar electrical and chemical properties as Si or SiC) to improve performance of the semiconductor device over other types of semiconductor devices without increasing cost. However, semiconductor devices that rely on a combination of a GaN substrate and a common substrate may suffer from an abnormally high rate of traps. Having a high rate of traps may render the GaN based semiconductor device to be ineffective and unusable as a High Electron Mobility Effect Transistors (HEMT). For example, current collapse in a GaN based semiconductor device can increase RDSON of the GaN based semiconductor device by a factor of 100, and in effect, render the GaN semiconductor device useless for most HEMT applications.